[mythtv-users] Mythfrontend Startup Tuning

[Michael T. Dean]

On 04/18/2012 06:51 PM, Rich West wrote:
> I just upgraded to mythtv 0.25 two nights ago, and I have to give major
> kudos to the devs!! woo-hoo!  Super clean upgrade process, no real downtime
> = happy spouse!  :)  I had a little trouble with the themes not working, but
> that cleared itself up (to a degree).
>
> I did notice that the frontend process seemed to hang for several seconds
> upon startup before it displayed the mainmenu.xml content.  I looked at the
> logs, and saw a mess of DBus errors.  My frontend systems don't have any
> optical drives in it (I'm in a full client-server model, where everything
> comes from the server), I was wondering how I can shave off the 5 seconds
> (more than 50% of the startup time) where it logs the following errors.
>
> Frontend config:
> MythTV 0.25
> Fedora 16 (latest updates)
> ATrpms install
> XFCE (with auto login, trimmed down)
>
> Startup time is like 30.54 seconds (kernel) plus about another 18 seconds
> starting X, and then ~8.4 seconds to bring up the mythtv menu.  I know it
> sounds silly, but those last 5 seconds of a blank mythtv theme background
> just seem the most painful (like it isn't doing anything).

You're not running the udisks service (udisksd).  There was a change 
made to poll udisks to for the media monitor stuff.  It seriously needs 
rewriting, but the 5s delay on startup is lower impact to me (I also 
don't run udisks) than the amount of time it would take to rewrite it 
properly.

Easiest workaround is to just install udisks.  
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/udisks

I considered skipping the loop (which, btw, is only required for broken 
systems that start mythfrontend before required dependencies are 
started) when media monitor is disabled, but doing so would have 
prevented some other things from working for those who disable media 
monitor (like the CD/DVD eject functionality).  Therefore, I'm currently 
living with the 5s delay on startup (but since I only start mythfrontend 
occasionally and almost always when I'm not actually using the system, 
it's not a big problem, for now).

Mike